Mechanics of Growth
Mechanics of Growth - Inbound-Led Outbound Workshop Live
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do Santosh. If anybody follows me or us on LinkedIn, I talk about
Santosh a lot. Santosh writes a lot. If you see my steps, you're
probably seeing his posts because we work at the same company. If
you have not had a chance to look over Santosh is LinkedIn, you
really should. Santosh, I'll just drop it in the chat real quick.
This man has accomplished a tremendous amount in his career.
He's going to talk a lot about it today. And he's the thing that I
think is so cool about Santosh is he was a part of some of the
biggest companies of our time when they were like startups like
you and me and you know, all of us. So he has seen how the magic
happens. He's seen kind of the fundamental building blocks that
have led to this ongoing explosive growth that a lot of
these companies have had. And he's actually working with a ton of
companies that haven't seen it, which is maybe the most
interesting part of this whole thing. So I'm going to turn it
over to Santosh. And he's going to talk to us about, you know, the
experience he's had and, you know, observations about
exponential growth, what it is, you know, what the ingredients
are. And one last thing before I handed over. So we thought that,
I mean, I imagined that the attendees will keep going up as
we go in the first sort of 10 minutes here. We're going to try
to do questions in the chat. And I'm going to pick out the best
questions and tell the person to speak. So that's going to be our
attempt this week. I'll let you know if that changes. But as he's
presenting, just write questions in the chat. And then I will
aggregate, I will aggregate answers. I will aggregate questions
and then invite people to ask them because we're going to have
you ask, you know, with your voice not mine. Okay, Santosh, let's
go.
Thank you, Adam. Let's dive in. So like Adam said, I've been
fortunate to have witnessed multiple high growth companies.
And my assessment is that building a unicorn or building a
immensely high growth company is not as difficult as, you know,
it's made out to be. In fact, it is the growth is the most natural
thing, right, in the nature or in our economy, our economy
continues to grow. Individual aspirations continue to grow. And
yet, if you look at, you know, most of the startups don't grow.
In fact, they don't even survive, right? And then a handful
grow disproportionately. So let's talk about, you know, what are
the common traits in some of these growing companies? And what
can we do to emulate some of this growth?
There we go. So before I talk about the best practices that I
picked up along the way, I'll take you to the summer of 2012.
Around the time I joined Zoom info, Zoom info had been in
business for about 12 years and doing maybe 10 million or even
below in revenue. And it didn't look a very happy place. It
looked very attractive as a company. This was also the
summer when LinkedIn had gone IPO. And I was, I made some
investments and I was reading their prospectus. And I got
fascinated by data businesses and data economy in general.
So one thing led to another, and I joined Zoom info as VP of
product later growth and strategies. And the next four
year was some of my most formative years at Zoom info.
Learned a ton and witnessed some spectacular growth where we
almost doubled revenue every year. I stayed at Zoom info for a
total of five, five and a half years, some as advisor, host,
my tenure. But here's something very interesting. After my job at
Zoom info, I thought, great, I've managed, I've seen how come
data companies can be scaled from like single digit to close to
100 million in ARR. Now I can go around and share these best
practices to many other companies. So I advised or worked
with over 20 data company in the next 10 years. And I shared
the best practices I saw in Zoom info on how they sold, how
they build data, how they build teams, crickets, like I was
dumbfounded because it worked with a handful, but it didn't
work with 90% of the companies I shared this information with.
And it was extremely puzzling for me, especially because if
you have been in the data space, you realize that data
companies are very similar to each other, right? They're selling
to the exact same buyers. They bind data from the exact same
vendors. And then they're building the same products, right?
It's just a data browser or search engine. So the only
variable was they had a different team with different
ambition with different capitalization, all the non kind of
data related stuff. And the lessons I learned on why some
companies succeed while others don't are primarily isolated
around these variables. So in the next 20 minutes, I'm going to
share these nine kind of lessons. So just quickly going
through it. What I've learned is sharing best practices don't
help, because every company is in a different journey, has a
different or DNA. But more importantly, these best
practices, they the more they use the less efficient they
become. So you got to innovate rather than copy from your
market leader. You'd be surprised how many founders don't
play to where this is something I learned along the way. They
are playing not to lose. A lot of the founders are not
thinking about and highlighting your competitors will live in a
winner take our model. So unless you dominate, you don't
survive. So we'll talk talk about that. And the role it plays
into into building high growth companies. We'll talk about
S curves. And then we live in a new world where you don't have
sustainable moat. No business has a mode that you can keep
charging premium for long term. Instead, you have micro
modes. We'll talk about that. And then if you want to compete,
there's always with your largest competitor, there's always an
opportunity at the lower end. And we'll see how that played out
in my experience. And then the last three hype and attention is
really important to discount your future marketing. You need to
build a business that like tomorrow looks better than today
and day after always looks better than tomorrow. Right. And
how fly wheels help. And then lastly, the team that you build
is really the key to unlocking this potential.
All right, first takeaway, like I mentioned, the best practices,
I mean, this is a common urge when founders, if they are early
in their journey, what they want to do is copy from the market
leaders, right? And they try to find employees that have worked
in either one of these market leaders and they try to replicate
what has been done. That's a that's a recipe for disaster for
a variety of reasons. But let me take you back to 2012 or 2013.
And I'll show you with specific examples. Why that doesn't work.
So back to zoom in for this was 2012 or 13, we were getting
about 200, 300 inbound leads a month. And then we published all
of our contact and company data to a search engine using
programmatic SEO. So we generated more pages than time
owners CNN has on search engine, like 50 million, 100 million of
these profile pages, right? The next thing within next two or
three months are inbound leads went from like 200 to 50 a month
to 40,000 a month. Right, brilliant strategy. Now we had to
hire inbound qualification team of 10 or 15 people to figure out
how to make sense of these 40,000 weeks, because a lot of them
were junk and a few useful. But this strategy may still work
for many verticals. If you're looking for, you know,
capturing attention, this is great way because as soon as we
publish these pages, no matter what you search for, zoom in
who showed up in the first page, right? And now back to so eight
years later, we did something similar at Apollo and here were
the results. So zoom info, same strategy gave us like 40,000
new leads a month. Apollo still work pretty well. It was started
with 4000. It may have gone up to like 10,000 in several months
down the line. Still captured early attention. But if you were
doing it today in the same data space, I'd be surprised if you
get even 400 or 500 new leads a month. Right. So what was the
best practice? 10, 12 years ago, because every single data
company has published the same page. So Google's now competing
against everyone's page and discounting and so on. So, but
this is maybe a slightly technical example, but this is the
same example works for all kinds of best practice. Now, going
back to the way zoom info grew or captured earlier attention,
which is really important for, you know, unicorn to be in
making is your buyers need to know that you exist and need to
see you almost every single day before you become a unicorn.
And zoom in for achieve that through programmatic SEO, Apollo
maybe have programmatic SEO. But what they did is zoom in for
a whole different enterprise business, but a follow went
after the low end of the market. So they coupled it with free
data and PLG and that provided probably arguably even more
boost to the wider load than the SEO for Apollo. But if somebody
was doing it today, neither usually a whole different strategy
to work. All right, that was just take away one. We got eight
people. If you're trying to build a unicorn or a big business,
this is really important. I have run into so many founders that
simply not playing to where I mean, this is a very personal and
a harsh question to ask yourself, are you really in it to like
do whatever it takes because most most most don't. So I have
run into two kinds of founders, some that are very early in their
career or very late in their career, right? The early ones
haven't seen too many ventures and late ones have seen a lot. I
find them both of them to be very successful. It's the ones in
the middle that have seen a successor to they get strong
confirmation bias, right? Or they've seen a buddy succeed. They
want success. But only if it takes the exact same path they've
seen before, they're not willing and success is never a
straight line. It takes surprisingly different parts and
the willingness to innovate kind of and take risks is so key. If
you think about like since we're talking about zoom info and
Apollo, at its start, zoom info was run by Yarneton, where this
was his fourth, the fifth company very experienced entrepreneur,
right? And Henry, this zoom info was his first, Henry runs
zoom in for now, right? He acquired the company from Yarneton.
So this was his first come both brilliant in there. And then
Apollo has a similar profile kind of leadership team. A lot of
these best practices that I shared with some of the other
entrepreneurs didn't share that profile or conviction. And
hence may not have benefited. But if you look at some of the,
you know, characteristics of founders that are playing to win,
you've always got to be in a fence rather than playing
defense, right? So you can take a quick read. Accountability is
important and incredible ambition is important. Let me tell you
a story. So Adam, I consider him as playing to win, right? So
when you're running a company, you'll get all kinds of surprising
unexpected sort of, you know, curveballs thrown at you. And
your job is to make the best of it even turn it to your
advantage. So here's a quick story. A few weeks ago, Adam calls
me late evening around 8pm my time and tells me Santo, we got
sued by one of our competitors. And if you've been reading his
LinkedIn, you probably know the details. And my first reaction
was like, Oh, shit, like, but I saw he was gaining energy as he
was describing. And then in the next half an hour, we convinced
ourselves that this was the best thing. And we could leverage
that to capture more attention, right, which is our goal at this
stage at RV to be. And that to me is played to win and not playing
defense all the time. I think there is a certain very small
group of founders and companies that are really committing and
giving it all to be successful. Right, I hope you're doing well
in time. So this is another mindset hack. Competing to really
dominate because we live in a in a strange market right now,
because of information symmetry, all the buyers are interconnected,
right? So great ideas get oversubscribe and bad ideas get over
punished. Right, so you know, world like this today, if you
have to build a unicorn, you need to completely and highlight
your competitor just to survive, because it's not going to be the
bulk of his debt, right? It's not going to be like, like 10
different companies, all equally sharing market share, it's
going to be like winner check all one or two companies taking
80% of the market share and the rest fighting for crumbs. So
look at this graph here. So this most startups, they start with
at the lower quadrant, where they're trying to survive, right?
And this is not a time to think about how you dominate the
space. You need to cross this line of economic freedom in order
to buy the rights to dominate, right? So if you are if you find
yourself at the bottom left, try to cross that. And the two ways
you can cross, right? Either you become profitable, or if you
have bootstrapped or raise a shit ton of capital, right? If you
can raise 50 million, 100 million. At that point, you don't
care about revenues as much, right? Or you can, even if you're
not profitable, you can dumb it. But let's talk about the
characteristics of companies at the top right, right? So there's
less worry about day to day survival, right? There's a long
term purpose. And there's a lot of peace and strategic thinking
once you get to the right. And by the way, you can do that at
5 million in revenue, you don't have to be 100 million in order
to start to think about dominating your space, right? It's
more of a mindset game than you can be very early. And yet
attempt to start to crush your competitors. So
give an example, Santos. Yeah, let's, yeah. So yeah, I think
every some of you know this, my company was spun out of an
email newsletter app, I had a 3 million ARR app like Mail
Chimp that I couldn't grow. And so try to have much stuff.
retention.com was the result of that. The best example of this
I've ever heard of in my life was the email marketing space.
Constant contact was the pioneer. They IPO'd in 2009 at 100
million of revenue. And there were two companies called iContact
and vertical response that were trying to do the exact same
thing is constant contact with less resources. Mail Chimp at
the time had 2 million ARR. And they did something that that
none of them could actually even match because of the places
they were in their funding cycles. They had a free self
serve offer, which everyone said was stupid and cheap and
whatever. And over the next 15 years, they became 12 times
the size of constant contact. Literally, when they did that,
when constant contact was 100 million ARR and they went
free, there were 2 million ARR. And within five years, they
were over 100. So that's an example of it's a dominant
pricing move, or it's a dominant go to market strategy that the
incumbents just couldn't match. So I think part of this is just
trying to do things that you know your your competitors are
unwilling or unable to actually do. And a lot of times it can be
this like user acquisition and then just being able to stay in
the game long enough to let that be a truly dominant strategy
back to you.
Thank you. So the next takeaway, best companies are always
stacking escrow to create competitive differentiation. So
I like to say this success is never a straight line, but it's
most often denoted by escrow. So for you know, this is something
we often ask ourselves. So I look at I think in terms of
escrow even in my personal life. So if you find yourself
putting in effort and getting no result and you put in another
double your effort and you still don't get any results within
your business or personal life. And then you see somebody across
the office putting in 110 the effort and getting immediate
result. The reason is that you haven't seen the nine 10 the
effort they put in before the way you get results in business or
elsewhere is when you reach a tipping point or your efforts
accumulate or your learnings accumulate where you get all
the results all at once. And this is the hyper growth phase of
companies, right? And then once you reach the top end, even if
you do the same initiative or you're not going to get any more
growth, you're tapped out for a variety of reason. And then but
if you don't do it, you start to decelerate. Right. So that
just becomes the new normal. And the way to keep growing is to
keep stacking these escrow. So if you look at companies that have
continuous or sustainable growth, it's a result of many strategies
that were timed just perfectly, either implicitly or explicitly.
So for instance, just very high level to explain this
concept, I put this say, zoom in for post IPO, right? So they
had gone into enterprise buyers and they further penetrate it
into enterprise. And after a while, this wouldn't have given them
continued growth. Right. So what they did is acquired a bunch
of companies. So they could sell more SKUs into the same 30,000
enterprise buyers, they had they were already selling into
right. So that that bought them a few years of growth. But then
that kind of started to peter out as well. And then you can see
they're going after global data. And they increasing their
penetration into the enterprise buyers and so on. So that, but
for each of these escrow, there are probably 50 other kind of
detail or low level escrow or initiatives or that have to be
timed as well. So it's, I find it a bit of an art to kind of
time these initiatives, right? But as a leader, what you ought to
do, I found it useful is always have a big initiative queued up
for the company, right? If you're trying, and if you have too
many of these initiatives or too many of these escrow, they just
becomes chaotic. But having none is also dangerous. But yeah,
just pick one or two always that will, that's how you
institute change in the company, even if you are doing well.
All right, three more to go off. So we do not live in the world
anymore. Well, other than certain industry where you can
patent and actually create a board, but a lot of the software
that idea of sustainable economic mode is old school thinking,
right? If you have a six month mode, because you created a
feature that somebody else can replicate, that's okay, take
advantage of that six shot mode and create a growth spot. So
for instance, there was a time when zoom in for the phone number
was the best in the industry. I don't know if it still is, but
that would them for a few years of growth. There's a time when
Apollo's data was all free or close to free and a lot of agencies
were just reselling it, right? That was a bit of a mode for the
time being, may not be true anymore and so on. So these take
you help you ride through these as girls, right? So
recognizing this more and they can come in the shape of low
subscription cost or features or you're a good market.
All right.
This is really important. If you're looking to disrupt your
aid, like really large companies, this is a disruptive
innovation model by Clay Christians and right. So if you
look at this graph, I, I snagged this picture from one of my
LinkedIn posts, zoom in for date to DNB. What Apollo is doing to
zoom in for what somebody knew could do to Apollo. So let me
break this down. So DNB was the ultimate data company, right?
200 year old data company. When we were trying to grow zoom
info 2012, 2013, we were going after SMB mid market, right?
DNB was selling data as $250,000 a year. And we innovated at
zoom info by selling it three seat license for $5,000 a year.
That is a huge innovation. Now it may not seem, you know, it
because everybody else does the same, but it was a bit of a risk
that zoom info was taking. There were many companies like
net prospects of pension and a few others, none of them decided
to build self-sir subscription tool at this low price. Apollo
went after the low end of the market because by the time
Apollo started to attack zoom info, they had raised price to
$30,000 a year, minimal, right? So what is important to keep in
mind is when you fight for the least paying customers, companies
don't want to, they'd rather abandon that fight and walk away
than give you a good fire, right? So if you're a small
company, fighting for the least paying customer is a great
strategy to penetrate market with a slight change in form
factor or a slight change in. So in the spiritual time, let's
keep moving. If you're building a unicorn, it's really
important to capture attention. And I find that most companies
figure out either implicitly or explicitly, like I mentioned
at the beginning of this presentation, zoom info, figure it
out very early in the game, how to keep showing on Google first
page, no matter what you search for, which means they were
generating probably millions, if not tens of millions of
impressions a day, organically, just because of their
programmatic SEO, right? And Apollo did the same, but in a
slightly different way, where they had, well, now they probably
have millions of users, a lot of them free. But if you think
about it, every one of them count when they're posting
something on LinkedIn, right? So Apollo has the user
community Apollo is far stronger than zoom info's user
community just by count, right? And that's a great
strategy. So have your build your own intentional hype
strategy, right? Or attention strategy to subsidize your
marketing costs. Otherwise, you're just going to be paying a
lot as you grow this business. So here's Adam posted this. So
look at the post that that he's been doing and the impression
it captures, right? The first thing you notice is growth or
impressions or signups, these days happen in posts, right? So
Belka is dead, there's no, there's no like guarantee growth
even if you so every growth comes from initiatives that you are
effort that you're putting in that day, right? So by this is
our marketing and RB2B, we are seeing half a million to a
million impressions every week. And I want to share a story on
how we did a product launch. So I have seen scores of product
launch in my life and never as successful as RB2B. So we are
it's only been 12 weeks since we launched our product. But in
the first two months, we spoke to about 300 of decision makers in
our ICP using LinkedIn posts. And the quick process was we get a
lot of engagement, we have some automation setup in the back
end to scrub engages by the right ICP. And then we automatically
send them a quick message saying, Hey, you want to chat and get
them on a calendar link and a zoom call for like 15 minutes.
And then we just don't sell, we just create credibility and then
move on to the next one. It's incredible how powerful this is
to subsidize your marketing costs and lead gen costs. So in just
12 weeks, we already have 7000 accounts signed up. And our
goal for 2024 is 12,025 over 30,000 accounts to give you a
sense zoom in for has 30,000 counts. We are doing we're getting
better at capturing attention. This is just the start. Once we
have this machine in coming, we can easily inject additional
products through this distribution. And which is what we intend
to do. But this is beginning to sound like the go to market for
that is unicorn worthy.
Customer subsidy, this tumor takeaways. So it's really important
to get more from your customers than just revenue. Right? So
customer should be subsidizing the future cost of customer
acquisition. So if you spend X dollar into getting Y
customers, then next year, we should be spending only half of
X and the year after only one fourth of X, right? So,
so let me explain how this works for say a data business like
Apollo zoom info. So then here's the fly fly wing. So as you get
more data, it, you know, decreases your go to market costs,
it makes the product better. And then you get more users or more
customers, right? And with more customers, since they are also
contributing data, and you have economies of scale, you get more
data, and then it keeps getting better and better. So you
guaranteed that your business is more efficient. Right? Two years
from now, five years from all you do is by time. So think about
a flywheel like this. And I go online and look, every company
has a flywheel that makes the business efficient. And you can
find you can build one for your business as well. Customers are
not just for revenues. So think about LinkedIn, right? So LinkedIn,
we are all contributing data of creating inventories for LinkedIn.
And we are also paying 15 billion in revenues. And then they
sell us products that we are essentially bill helping bill,
right? That is just the, I'm giving a lot of examples of
data companies, but the same can be done with non data
companies as well. So far, here are a few ways you can take
advantage of, or you can ask your customers, right? Data
contributions one, but let's talk about co creating business.
Can they give us ideas? Can you get referrals that will
subsidize your acquisition costs, reviews on G2 or UGC content
and help with the attention and hype and so on. So the goal is
your business should always continuously get better and
better. If every month, it takes the same amount of effort to
get the same revenue, then it's a it's a it's a difficult
business because trust me, it'll only get more difficult if
you don't have a way to subsidize costs. Alright, last take
away. Successful exec team is really the key to unlocking. So
in my 25 years of career, I have to say that the exit team at
I had retention and RB to be is highly unusual and I'm learning
a few lessons. I'm finally understanding the value of having
a tenure, right? And the reason is this team has worked
together for over 10 years and there's unbelievable trust.
Almost a family like born. There's a lot of accountability in
the team. And yet people are are totally willing to fail and
not afraid to challenge each other. The, you know, what I find
interesting is the there's a lot that changes in the business.
If you can find an exec team that you're guaranteed to not get
fired, if you get if you make mistakes, right? This is where
people start thinking about the business when they're taking
shower or going on long walks or their personal time and
great things happen. Alright, here's a summary of what we
discussed. Don't copy best practices. Try and innovate one
for your own business. Play to win, not play not to lose.
And try to dominate the space you are in and it's easier
than you think if you follow some of the frameworks. Keep
thinking about your next ask of change is a must if you want
to grow and recognize your micro modes, give value, bring it
up leverage. It's okay if it takes you only four months, six
months of growth, because by that time we'll figure out a new
mode. Your largest competitor always has a week under
belly, especially at the low end. So if you want to compete, go
after disruptive innovation at the low end and then have an
intentional plan for attention to discount your marketing and
discount your sales and work on your exec team. Now, one last
slide. It's only been 12 weeks for us at RB2B and we have four
employees, a full time working on this project. We have already
accomplished over 20 million impressions with over 7000
account signups. Now, take a moment to consume those numbers
and tell me if this is not a unicorn in making. But if we
can do it with so little resource each of you can. Thank
you.
Thank you, Santos.
Let's go, Santos. All right, so I'm going to ask the first
question because there were two questions that I thought were
really good that are very closely related that ran more and
Mike Miggly asked. So Santos, when you talk about dominating
the market, what about the niche? There's a big difference in
dominating space like email marketing versus dominating
something like best demand aid agency for fashion, e-commerce
brands in Italy. And then closely related, is this for SaaS
tech orgs? Or do you see this statement play to win and be so
competitive whether it's not prepared to go? Does that apply
to service business models too? Right? So it's kind of like,
the question is, is it always appropriate to think in this
way? Or does this only apply to SaaS? Right? Like,
that's a great question. I think it applies more to tech and
SaaS. And because buyers are more interconnected when they're
buying with all these tools like G2 and others have created a
certain information symmetry. You want to create that, that like
a snowball effect, right? And take advantage. I don't see the
similar information symmetry around agencies, where if an
agency appears to be growing and doing well, everybody starts
working to the same agency, right? So may not be as applicable on
the service business as it is for products and tech.
Okay, perfect. Okay, curious about your point of view of
ecosystem piggybacking strategies for SaaS growth. So
integration plus comarketing inside of an ecosystem like HubSpot
or Shopify versus being ecosystem agnostic. Do you have a view
on this? Well, totally. I think, you know, especially when your
early stage and you're trying to grab as many eyeballs as you
possibly can, why eliminate any and ecosystems are in fact, a
great, it gives you a tremendous boost, right? Because a
captive audience, I would say do all but certainly ecosystem and
it does help a lot.
Um, related question, any product led partner strategies you've
executed similar to your programmatic SEO strategy and
seeing success in your career?
Well, there are too many, but I'll, I'll limit. So when you are
early and trying to grow faster than market would allow, you
need some kind of reseller partnerships and agency
partnerships or I've seen a poll do that a little bit better
than zoomin for dead. But yes, there are many. Ultimately, you
need to think constantly about nonlinear ways to grow business.
Right? Linear is going to be too slow. So nonlinear could be
can other sell or help you with the growth or, you know, can you
get an unfair advantage like the programmatic SEO and so on. So
yeah, let me, let me pause there. I'm happy to take this. I
have more thoughts, but if you want to whoever asked this and
be a note and I can, I can add some more later.
Oh, we got a good one that I think would be good for us to
answer on LinkedIn just now. Bonus Sharma says, what do Adam
you disagree on when it comes to go to market? That's a really
good one. It is it is. Yeah.
You know, so what comes to mind initially is when we were
trying to so Santos joined us a year and a half ago when we
were convinced retention.com was like a unicorn twice over.
That didn't end up happening because long story short, the
churn problem that we thought we were going to solve did get
solved for a lot of reasons. But that question that was just
asked was something Santos was like very focused on product
type partnerships. And Diane and I were just like, we have
never had one of these work for us. I don't know whether it
was just the situation that we were in like the type of product
that we had in the incentive alignment between vendors. But
Diane and I would just feel like so much us was pushing us
into these things that we we knew were not going to work.
Now that I'm in the middle of RBDB, like we have this this
lead gen agency opportunity where I see this perfect alignment
between the tech vendor who is us and the agencies. And like, I
just see it working so well. I mean, that's not particularly,
that's not like a product. It's agencies different than a
product led tech partnership. But that was that was the first
thing that came to mind. Santos definitely coached me into
believing in a lot of this. You know, like, watching Mailchimp,
I became obsessed with this freemium thing. But I think it
took Santos being a part of our team for me to have the, the
sort of strength to want to actually, you know, go for it
and, you know, take the revenue deferral and, you know, deal
with all of the problems related for users that you have to do
and when you're executing something like that. What do you
think, Santos?
Yeah, let me answer that differently. You covered, I want
to talk about what do you do when there is this disagreements
in, you know, exec teams. And it's really important to it
almost doesn't matter who is right. Success is an outcome of
the cumulative conviction and lessons we learn as a team.
Right. So eventually you'll find as you keep working together,
there's more and more synergies and a lot of the ideas start to
converge. But if there are discrete agreement is like do a
quantiles or talk each other out. And if you if you can't, then
just, you know, give in and you'll find a lot of those will
start to converge over time.
Great.
Can you explain extreme PLG? I think that was probably a big
question mark for a lot of people that were listening to
presentation.
So, POG has some limitations as well. Right. So, so by
extreme PLG, I mean, a little bit of what we have started to do
at RB to be where you are, you know, with PLG, it's still the
top of the funnel is not as I guess you need to bring traffic
convince them on your website and then get them to sign and
hopefully pay eventually. What we are doing with the LinkedIn
lead growth is we are getting a lot more traffic. And now in
some ways that the product we have for RB to be is not as
friendly for what we are delivering. Because it's not a
user based product, right? It is more of a company based, like
you can only have one RB to be subscription for one account.
But if we had a user based product, our approach would be
closer to an extreme PLG. I think users want to learn, like go
beyond the product, they want to solve a real problem in the
lives, right? And I think, yeah, just a lot more traffic, a
lower hurdle to signing up. Let's focus on converting them into
revenues is what I call it.
As an example, we had talked about, sounds, I literally set in
a room and talked about what would kill Apollo at some point
last year. And he's like, eventually, someone's just going to
have a free contact data database, like Google has a free
database of websites. And that will be like, they'll charge
for something else or something like that. As an example of like
what an extreme form of PLG might be. So, Santosh, somebody
asked a question about net revenue retention, Liam did. So
and I know I've read a post of yours where you talk about when
paying attention to revenue retention may not actually be
appropriate. And that was actually his question is like, why do
some people not focus on revenue retention? So in your
experience, when does it make sense to pay attention to? And
when could you maybe not have it be your, your, you know,
whatever, nor star metric?
Right. So around revenue, so here's, I have some strong ideas
on revenues in general, and then I'll come to revenue retention.
Revenue is simply a friction to growth. Right. So think about
that from any time you ask for money, you're you're
decelerating growth. So in the beginning, when you're trying
to grow, the more you can defer revenue, the more you can
defer annual contracts, the more money you make in the
long run. Right. And I totally understand not everybody is in
the space to do this. But in terms of retention,
this is a complex topic. What you're offering has to, like,
provide the synergy for the buyers and like looking at the,
you know, landscape and so on. But if you can defer all these
churn discussions and revenue to later, when you already have
10,000 users using you, you'd find you can solve this
problem so much more with when you're operating with large
numbers, rather than when you, you know, there's a lot of
urge to just get the business right for the first 100
customer or first 1000. It's just far easier to solve these
problems when you have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 users using
him.
Thank you very much, sir. How about Nat? She has a question
about the data space in particular. Santos, where do you
place Clearbit on the map in your den of Bradstreet's and
info Apollo matrix? Clearbit was free PLG plus upmarket paid
offerings would love your take on their journey. And what you
might have done differently, basically.
So clear bit started off really well in some ways they
innovated in directions others didn't. But they were almost
too true to their founding principles of like using APIs.
And they came late into building UI and prospecting tools and
workflows and so on. And also, they never really invested in
capturing attention the way other companies did. So those are
the reason why I think it was a bit of a missed opportunity,
they could have been a lot bigger and a lot better than others.
They did do a few few things right. But they were too focused
on API first type product, which I think like in the hindsight,
if I were to recommend, I would say they should jump into
products and subscription product a little bit earlier.
All right, thank you very much.
Micah Friedman asks, Santosh, how do you define offense and
defense?
How do I find or how do you define?
Define, like maybe examples of like what it means to be a
startup who is playing defense and what it means. I mean, you
told my story, but like,
that's really great.
So let me let me try differently. So when you start up,
you're starting I about some billion dollar company in your
space, right? And you find yourself always copying what they
do, right? And always, this is like more of a mindset where you
always think then we had a few and they are so much better.
Instead, I would encourage to change your mindset into trying
to wreck their business, right? And it's not that difficult to
kind of reduce that gap over time, right, with a different
mindset. And the way this works is, instead of trying to find,
you know, a gap in the offering or trying to defend and say, yeah,
they're better. But here's how we are just, you know, you're
marketing your sales, you're, we live in a world where you
grab attention when you're aggressive, when you have
clarity of identity of who you are, and you communicate best.
And if you're trying to hide behind defensive, I think
approach, it's just going to slow you down. You have to take
this on directly. If you're objective, you have to compete
with a large competitor.
So if you look at, I mean, the examples I mentioned of both
Zumin for an Apollo, they started off being very defensive.
But then both became very offensive to compete with each
other and D&P and so on. But that's the only way to kind of
cut through the noise and generate attention.
One thing you've told me before, Saint-Touche is Apollo
basically before they did this business model innovation, they
were basically trying to sell worse data than Zuminfo for
half of the price, but doing basically the same thing.
Yeah, it was like a 30K ACV contract versus a 15K CV
contract. And then they started to take off when it was like
data is $99, right? Like just radically different than like
the incumbent is, is just like anything else. It's what's
going to cut through. Okay, so
ran more as a follow up. So if we're building a data platform
to track business performance, there's some giants in the space
hundreds, if not thousands of competitors. Sure, mindset beat
to dominate the market and be the biggest data platform out there,
which is a very high aspiration or niche down.
Nichta.
Do you understand that?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So if you can find a vertical or a niche,
this is a really big wave that's going to come in the
DSPs, right? If you look at horizontal SAS, let do vertical
SAS, right? And all these sales force, instead of building the
new Salesforce people are building a Salesforce for legal
professionals, right? So the same phenomena is going to play
out. Vertical SAS needs vertical data, which doesn't exist
right now. There's some in ECOM and, but most verticals don't
have their own zoom in force of the work. And it just matter of
time. So if you have the opportunity to go niche, and
they're going to be big enough, like billion dollar businesses
may not be 10 billion. But there's a ton of opportunity in
going niche right now.
I agree. So I'm just trying to talk about this all the time.
It's like, you know, we're kind of competing in a space where
there's been a ton of bundling. So having a super simple free
point solution is like cutting through like crazy. But if the
point solutions were the market, then bundling would be very
different, you know, so yeah, there's a lot of sort of highly
place in time dependent.
You know, my instinct is always try to be as different as
possible. So okay, next question. I'm a marketing manager
at Snow Video, which is the same niche as Apollo RV to be
Ziminfo. What do you think would be a great move to generate a
lot of awareness? We do SEO. But as you said, it's decayed.
We have a number of registrants monthly through SEO, but we're
looking to scale awareness, basically. What would you do?
He's right. A lot of these strategies have been best
practices have been tried and they get decaying results. In
the end, you want to solve people's problem, right? So take some
good practices at RV to be, right? We're trying to create a
community through content just like this, right? And a lot of
the other contents. You would be surprised even in this
crowded market, if you can create a strong follower strong
community around data, they could just buy from you instead of
other, right? It's commoditized anyways. So in a commoditized
marketplace, create affinity, right? Create connections. And
that's not something that's been done. The bigger the company,
the less weak their relationships they have with their
customers.
So the way you get it.
Yeah, no. Did you want to add something?
No, okay. All right, we got another good question, man.
Banu Sharma is asking some great ones over on LinkedIn. So if
Adam wasn't so natural at it, would you still take a content
centric playbook for go to market?
It's really valid question.
No, because like I said, you know, every great question, by
the way, every business has a DNA like I call it
organizational DNA, just like individual DNA. And all your
strategies have to take advantage of this DNA, right? It's
best to play to your strength rather than other people's
weakness, right? And Adam is unbelievably good at this.
And it does work for us. And this is where I say just copying
the breast practice that's working for us may not work for
you, because you've got to play to your strengths.
Yeah. And I kind of only figured out that I was really good at
this like nine months ago, which was very interesting. So
you should try. And if you go back and look at my stuff 18
months ago, I honestly don't think you'd look at it and be
like, this guy's supernatural at it. It was hundreds of hours
and thousands of posts swinging and missing before I sort of
figured out what, you know, how to make something hit and like
how to come across on this medium is, is what you do define
is natural. I'm not kidding you look at my old LinkedIn stuff
from like 12 14 months ago. Natural is not what you what you
might call it.
Yes, here's a quick petition. If you think about zooming for
their real strength is not data, it's good to mark team and the
sales team, their hands down the best sales team I've ever worked
with, they could be selling shoe and water or furniture and
still be the best and it's that good. Right. But if you look
at Apollo, they're engineering and product team is unbelievable
because they have built a platform that is comparable or
starting to compare with zooming for, but they didn't acquire
any, right? They built it all in house. Every company has to
even in the same space has to pick a dominant strategy that
plays on this track.
Okay, next one, we got another good one for you, Santish.
At it from a career standpoint, do you recommend to stay in an
industry or in the same lane for decades and decades or jump
around? That was from manly and LinkedIn. That's such a great
question. I tend to be intellectually curious and I learn a
ton when I'm like moving around. In fact, the most I learn is
in the first few months of a job. What I did for last 15 years
is why I moved around very frequently. I stayed in the same
industry. So my relationships, my understanding of the industry
just kept accumulating. Business is getting complex these days
and find something to stick around with. If you think your
sales or marketing or whatever skills you have or domain, you
can accumulate where you bring some of the learnings from the
past and then maybe stick, switch around. I'm a big believer
of switching companies, but keeping industry or some market
domain the same. That's how you create expertise.
How do you know when to switch industries? Honestly, in the
first year, I kind of get a sense of... So let me see the best
way to respond to this. At this age, I kind of get a sense
whether a company is going to make it or not. Some of the best
times I've had is when companies are fast growing or trying hard
to grow, the best of human potential shows up. I love being
around in teams like that. So either it's not going to go that
way or it's too toxic even if they're growing. Either way, I
just keep moving. And few times, I feel like the team is great
and I'd love to stick around, which RB2B is one of them.
Well, we are certainly happy about that. Okay, so we're
going to take one more question. But before we take it, I'm going
to just drop the registration link in the chat. Next week, I'm up
again, I'm talking about this LinkedIn journey and like what I
mean, the whole thing of the first LinkedIn post I did and
spent two hours on and no one engaged with it. And then my
Ghostwriter did one the next day. It was a photo of a tweet. He
spent 30 seconds on it and it got 3000 likes. Starting from
there, this breakthrough I had over Labor Day last year,
everything about it, what I'm trying to do, why I think it's
working, you know, what I'm the bet I'm making for 2024. So all
about LinkedIn, if you're for whatever reason not registered,
I dropped the registration link in the chat and on LinkedIn live.
I'd love to see you there. And I hope everybody you can ask
questions from Santosh next week too, if if you think about
any. Oh, here's a good one. Let's end it on this. In a cut
through competitive market, where everyone has the same
moat, so no moat, is it a distribution war? Are under
bellies? And underbellies are already consumed. And so basically,
long story short, and by the way, I believe this is the world
that we're headed into, I think we're gonna all have 500 more
competitors than we have now in like three years, just because
how good the language models are getting everything. So the
question is, is this just a distribution war? What do you do
to break through in this world of radically increased
competition? Santosh, close this out with that one.
Capture attention. So you're right. And this is if you have
20 competitors today, give it another two years and you'll
have 200 competitors. The number of companies in every segment
is only growing because the cost of software development is
going down with automation. It'll what took six months to
develop will take six weeks, right? How do you differentiate?
Figure out go to market more ironically, the more affinity
you have with your buyers, the more value you can give them
along the way before they actually make a decision to buy is
going to be your real mode. And in this day of automation, you'd
be surprised how few companies are willing to put their name
and face out there to create this relationship. So go to market
mode is going to be the only and ultimate mode out there.
Yeah, I mean, what we're trying to do, I mean, Santos making
videos all the time, I'm making videos all the time. Our
personal view is that this LinkedIn machine, the magic of it
is you can scale human to human connection with it. In a
hyper commoditized world. A way to de commoditize is to create
affinity and then sell things into that affinity, whatever you
want to call it brand, right? Like, great questions. Thank you
so much, Santos. Thank you, everybody for showing up. We were
above 200 at one point. And I hope to see everybody next week.
I'm gonna go run to my next call. Thanks, everybody. I'll send
out a recording later today.
Yes. Bye.
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